In Memoriam is a recreation of Beinart’s great-great auntie cacti and succulents displays which won competitions, featuring in a local newspaper. Beinart includes information about the lady (http://www.axisweb.org/p/katybeinart). She had a love of botany from a young age, particularly in collecting and growing cacti. It’s specific, slightly peculiar, notable things like that which really define a relative I find. The plants are ceramic, “suggestive of holding memories, secrets gone with her, or perhaps seeds potent with possibility for future life.”

Tying in with this is Strangers in a Strange Land. Kensitas Cigarettes gave away woven flower silks with packs. The gaps in the album are filled in with cactic and succulents, the ‘strangers’ in the flower world, but also as a record of the plant explorers. It’s about recreating Beinart’s great-great auntie’s world, even if slightly fictional in places. The plants allowed her to explore far-flung lands, not physically, but through the plant and journals of plant explorers, visiting places she couldn’t possibly reach in reality. The armchair-traveller concept reminds me of mental wandering psychogeographers like wassisname and hoojamaflip. Beinart talks of a secret subtext behind the cacti relating to unrepressed desires and symbolism.

Resurrected features a scale model of her auntie’s greenhouse, with a digital image of it projected through the model. Beinart encourages us to ponder how we can reconstruct the past based on what can be seen and is factual and what can’t be seen clearly. Hence, the digital version is distorted and the ghostly effect of light.